You know, I don't have high hopes for this debate. We seem to have reached a new low, in terms of what we expect from the people who govern us -- and given the low we reached when George W. Bush was first campaigning, that is really saying something.
But I'd just like to reflect, for a moment, on the fact that asking a candidate for the Vice Presidency of the United States what newspapers they read is now considered, by some Republicans, to be a "gotcha" question.
Please tell me we're not serious, here. Asking someone "what newspapers do you read" has never before, to my knowledge, been considered a particularly hard-hitting question. It's never meant to be a trick question, or a devious media device. It is, on the contrary, one of those things that's meant to be a complete, open-ended, time-wasting pander, like "what's your favorite color?" or "do you like pasta?" Only in a fevered dream world could "what do you read?" be considered a challenging question.
Now, I recognize that asking someone to name significant decisions of the Supreme Court might be, you know, a bit of a hard question. Whether it should be a hard question for someone seeking to take the number two spot behind the presidency, I don't know, but I'll grant that it actually requires thought. The same with asking whether or not you know where your own running mate stands, on an issue -- I'll grant that, by God, you actually have to have had some small conscious awareness of the world around you in order to come up with an answer to that one.
But "what do you read" is something that I file under the other category of Questions To Ask Candidates. I call that other category, for the sake of simplicity, Questions A Clam Could Answer. There are the hard questions, and then there are the Questions A Clam Could Answer. Vertebrate questions, and bivalve questions. Questions that require a spinal cord to answer, and questions that do not.
I have every confidence that any plumber, truck driver, school teacher, public accountant, acrobat, farmer, fast food worker, middle manager, chiropractor, spokesman for the bacon industry, movie critic, tree pruner, freelance ghost hunter or dirt poor biochemistry graduate student living temporarily in his van could answer the question, "what newspapers do you read." Maybe the answer would be "none." Maybe the answer would be something else. But it would not, in general, be considered a devious plot by a potential saboteur, something to be responded to with a stutter, mouth agape, fishing for an answer that will not seem to come. It is only when you aspire to one of the highest offices in the land that suddenly you are given the kindness of having it be presumed that you cannot and should not answer Questions A Goddamned Clam Could Answer, and people will rise to your defense if you manage to foul the apparently unfoulable question.
All this leads, of course, to the obvious question: what possible questions could be asked of Sarah Palin that would not be assumed to be devious, or underhanded, or unnecessarily mean? I can presume that "what's your favorite book?" is right out, although any Oprah guest is expected to have the answer ready and at hand. I gather that "do you watch Survivor?" would probably be considered a media trap, and asking something like whether she ever watched the Discovery Channel would likely have the Republicans calling in the Secret Service to form a protective ring around her.
I don't know. Part of me is expecting this debate to be a train wreck, car crash and political typhoid outbreak all rolled into one; the other part of me suspects that as long as Palin is sufficiently belligerent, she doesn't actually have to know or even say much of anything at all. After all, absolute imbeciles have been applauded for their debate performances in the recent past (see Bush, George W.), and to good electoral effect, and Palin is clearly at least capable of rational thought -- though in the Couric interviews it seemed at least some of that rational thought was expressed primarily as muscle twitches. She may, in the debate, resort to the cannon blasts of Word Confetti that she displayed in the Couric interviews -- but honestly, how many people would notice? That is the trick of debates. You don't actually have to know anything -- you just have to be assertive and verbal enough that people watching think you do. Every high school debate team in the country knows as much.
In any event, I'd like to see the first question to Biden be about the economy and the bailout, because I'd like to hear the answer, no matter what it is. And I'd like the first question to Palin be, I don't know, let's say about her favorite color. A word of warning to the frantic Republican debate prep team -- if she names the wrong color, she might be seen as a secret supporter of some random insurgent group in some random country, somewhere in the world, that uses that color on their flags or buttons or uniforms. So the question is, in fact, a trap.